Currently, with the Internet, customers have come to expect up on-demand, up-to-date and relevant information. Enterprises that have traditionally valued print media for marketing communications are finding it a challenge to provide this kind of information, using traditional centralized printing and physical distribution techniques.
Marketing communication tools, such as brochures, direct mail, coupons, and inserts and customer relationship management components, such as orders, invoices, complaints and so on, are most significant drivers of business printing today. Typically, large percentage of trillion or so pages, printed per year by enterprises is used for marketing alone. Further, CRM and advertising industry account for a large percentage of the trillion or so pages printed per year. This makes print-based advertising significantly larger than online advertising, as print media can have certain inherent advantages such as retainability, ease-of-use, visual appearance, extensible display surface and so on, that are generally attractive for marketing.
Despite the above advantages of the print media, enterprises are increasingly investing in Web-based communication, often at the expense of printing. Some of the reasons for this shift are the ability of Web marketing to target and personalize messages, provide larger amount of content at near zero incremental cost, and the speed at which content can be updated and delivered. Currently, print based communication methods that involve centralized printing and physical distribution, such as direct mail do not provide enough speed, flexibility to modify content, personalization, traceability, and most significantly targetability. Further, online Web-based advertisements provide ability to generate actionable transactions and analytics. Furthermore, online Web-based advertisements provide high traceability and clickthrough measurability. Moreover, the online Web-based advertisements provide ability to change content at a short notice. Therefore, enterprises are investing heavily in online advertisements at the expense of other media of communications.
However, Web based marketing and advertising is unable to address the need of enterprises which value printed collaterals for effectiveness. Further, the current centralized printing and physical distribution, such as direct mail are push based systems and often are ill-directed and wasted. Furthermore, current techniques do not provide a means by which a consumer, in developing or emerging markets, can print information when he/she needs it without incurring printing cost, which can be prohibitive. This can significantly impact print based marketing and/or communication in these market segments.
Other features of the present embodiments will be apparent from the accompanying drawings and from the detailed description that follows.